Raging right is courting irrelevance

Saturday

Dec 1, 2012 at 6:00 AM

I continue to be amazed by the right’s reaction to their election night shellacking, even after almost a month has gone by.

Instead of doing the soul-searching necessary to appeal to a larger group of people, they have committed themselves to the political equivalent of a 4-year-old’s temper tantrum. I have seen letter after letter and article after article bemoaning President Obama’s fictitious promises of “free stuff” to his supporters. Instead of saying “Hmmm, perhaps we shouldn’t appeal so much to dog-whistle racism, homophobia and badly concealed misogyny if we ever want to win another presidential election,” they have decided that they didn’t win because they weren’t conservative enough.

Mitt Romney’s sneering farewell to the electorate in his post-election conference call with his donors told me all I needed to know — that behind closed doors his contempt for the poor and middle class is, as Patton Oswalt put it, so rich you could drizzle it over pancakes.

Keep on raging, Republicans. You’ve managed to make yourselves so angry over President Obama’s victory that you’ve missed the most important lesson: The American electorate is changing. It’s getting younger, less white, and less obsessed with social issues that you for some reason can’t seem to shut up about. And unless you wake up, your party will forever be consigned to the dustbin of history.